The poetry and music of the Alexandria Quartet

Lawrence Durrell in the ambiguous white metropolis

August 27, 2008
timesonline.co.uk

Excerpts:

"This is especially the case with the four novels that make up The Alexandria Quartet – Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea – published in quick succession from 1957 to 1960. It had not been Durrell’s original intention to carry the story over so long a span, but once begun, he found he had an irresistible impulse to complete the full trajectory of a long-fostered obsession. Alexandria became the mise en scène of his masterpiece, if not by accident, at least fortuitously. To state this is not to question the powerful presence of the city throughout the novels. But Durrell’s creative instinct appears to have hit on Alexandria as the right domain for his long-anticipated magnum opus because it had become highly familiar to him during his wartime exile and, more importantly, because an Alexandrian woman had entered his life at a critical point

Durrell’s years after school were spent in bohemian circles in London, but seemed to get him nowhere. In frustration he left London in the mid-1930s with an art student, Nancy Myers, to live on Corfu, beginning a lifetime’s devotion to all things Hellenistic and to the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean. He was joined on Corfu by his mother and the rest of his family, including Gerald. Their life there is recorded by Lawrence in Prospero’s Cell and by Gerald in several books. This celebration of their Corfu existence was written in the tower of a villa in Alexandria at the time of Lawrence’s most acute involvement with Egypt – though nothing can be imagined that is more unlike the pleasures of a Greek island than the dusty, noisy, claustrophobic Alexandrian suburb of Moharrem Bey.

In Alexandria Durrell would sometimes speak harshly of Egypt and the British and be scornful of most other nations, but never of Greece and its civilization. Though only ostensibly a Greek city, Alexandria harboured many Greek-speakers among its diverse inhabitants. There were also Italians, French and Jews, some endangered by their nationality in wartime, but Egyptian sovereignty and British suzerainty did not compromise the cosmopolitanism of the city.

n the 1830s the creator of modern Egypt, Muhammad Ali, invited Europeans to live in Alexandria and accelerate its prosperity. Ali’s equestrian statue still lopes in a friendly fashion in the square named after him in the heart of the commercial district, seeming to preside over the stately Corniche and the restored opulence of the Cecil Hotel, through whose doors Darley, Durrell’s alter ego and the narrator of the novels, and his lover, the mysterious Justine, pass on some of their clandestine appointments. By the first decades of the twentieth century Alexandria had regained its reputation as a fabulous site, though one notorious for the separation of rich and poor. Muslim Egyptians outnumbered foreigners but did not control public life. Today Alexandria has again fallen into dilapidation, and the visitor must search to find relics of its Victorian prime.

Many British writers were in Alexandria in the war years; like them, Durrell contributed poems and articles to such publications as Personal Landscape. Some of his most admired poems were composed in these years, and he was also able to publish his first collection, A Private Country, in 1943.

But one experience changed both his life and the direction of his writing: he met an Alexandrian woman whom he had first encountered there during his wartime residence. She was Claude Vincendon, a well-born Alexandrian from the Menasche family, one of the most influential in the city. Best for him, this new love was an encyclopedic source of information about all things Alexandrian. With Claude beside him he could now begin to impose order on the copious notes he had kept for over twenty years, the greater part of which dealt with life in Alexandria. Justine was begun at the beginning of the new decade and was to occupy him throughout the remainder of his stay on Cyprus.

edited by Aimee Kligman